Today a court in Mannheim, Germany, ruled that VP8 does not infringe a patent owned and asserted by Nokia. This decision is an important and positive step towards the WebM Project's ultimate goal: ensuring the web community has an open, high-quality, freely licensed video codec. Google's intervention in the underlying lawsuit (Nokia v. HTC) was a strong show of support for open standards like VP8.

I guess they'll have to dig out another patent somewhere to try and undermine Android, since Nokia isn't having much luck competing with Android by, you know, actually selling stuff. How the mighty have fallen, huh?

It would be rather stupid not trying to protect the rights you have or may have / demand fees you could get.

By doing the exact reverse and opening their VP8 codec with a free open source license, Google will end up deriving many thousands of times more business return out of their IP in VP8 than Nokia will ever derive from any of their video codec IP.